Student will review several pieces of software and find the licensing information.

Prerequisite Knowledge

Should have had an introduction intellectual property as it relates to software and to open source licenses.

Learning Objectives

Students should be able to find license information (in any of the places it might be located in a package)

Background:

This activity demonstrates that licensing information for a given piece of software can be found in a number of different places and gives students the experience of finding the license information for several actual projects/products. This is important because students need to know the license for any piece of code that they are working with *and* there is no *rule* saying where a license must be put (although there are some conventions that are followed).

Before attempting this activity, students need to understand the basic

Directions:

This exercise can be done individually or in small groups. The goal is to identify which license applies to each of several pieces of software and where that license information is found (which varies). I've provided some examples, when demonstrate a variety of different license locations and types.

In each case, the student(s) should

Find the site or software

Locate the license information

Record where the license information was found (for example, the URL of the page)

Bonus Activity: Identify the page and paragraph in which Instagram identifies what rights it has to your photos.

If possible, a classroom roundtable, discussing what licenses were found, where they were located, and how they were named would be a good wrap-up for this exercise.

Deliverables:

Students should turn in their findings -- I've provided an example format here.

Software

License

Where Found (URL or other location)

Apache OpenOffice 4

Apache License, Version 2.0, January 2004

Under the "Open Office" menu, I chose "About Open Office". That dialog had a License button, which is where I found the full text of the license.

Assessment:

Students can be graded on the completeness and correctness of the responses provided in the assigned work they turn in, as well as participation in the resulting discussion, should you choose to have one.

Comments:

The interesting thing to me about this activity is that there is no single, legal "required" location for the license information, nor any text that it must include. This can make it challenging to find the license info for a project (but doesn't reduce the importance of doing so!).

If you are working with an open source project, you should first locate the license for that project and use it as a jumping off point.

Additional Information:

Knowledge Area/Knowledge Unit

Social Issues and Professional Practice (SP) / Intellectual Property

Topic

Intellectual property rights

Level of Difficulty

Medium

Estimated Time to Completion

Each license should take ~10-15 minutes to find, so the length of the activity can be changed based on the amount of time available.

Suggestions for the Open Source Project:

It would be great if your project had information explaining why the project is licensed the way it is. If that information is available and you're willing to discuss it with students, that would make a really interesting (short) Skype or IRC chat.